ScienceBlogs Select

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Ricky Gervais on The Book of Genesis [Effect Measure]

revere none@example.com — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:37:03 -0500

Biblical exegesis as it was meant to be:

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Rhodes Secretary: Wall Street Megabonuses Draining Our Young Talent [The Scientific Activist]

Nick Anthis none@example.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:05:10 -0500

In the op-ed pages of The Washington Post today, Elliot Gerson--the American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust--takes a bold stand:

Tonight, 32 young Americans will win Rhodes Scholarships. Their tenures at Oxford are funded by the legacy of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, a man whose life would not be honored today were it not for his vision that young people of outstanding intellect, leadership and ambition could make the world a better place.

For more than a century Rhodes scholars have left Oxford with virtually any job available to them. For much of this time, they have overwhelmingly chosen paths in scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service. They have reached the highest levels in virtually all fields.

In the 1980s, however, the pattern of career choices began to change. Until then, even though business ambitions and management degrees have not been disfavored in our competition, business careers attracted relatively few Rhodes scholars. No one suggested this was an unfit domain; it was simply the rare scholar who went to Wall Street, finance and general business management. Only three American Rhodes scholars in the 1970s (out of 320) went directly into business from Oxford; by the late 1980s the number grew to that many in a year. Recently, more than twice as many went into business in just one year than did in the entire 1970s.

This break in an almost century-old pattern coincided with great increases in occupational earnings differentials, which have continued to grow, seemingly exponentially. It seems quaint, if not unfathomable, that just three decades ago the differentials in earnings -- generally two- to fivefold between business leaders and doctors or lawyers, or five- to tenfold with professors, scientists and public servants -- were often rationalized by Rhodes scholars as reasonable additional compensation to balance the lower standing of business jobs among their peers.

When differentials could become a hundredfold or far more -- and as investment banking and similar firms started to recruit young Rhodes scholars who had degrees in math, physics or even history, English and theology -- the yawning prospective wealth chasm understandably became impossible for many to ignore. Even for a few of those most deeply committed to other, more public-spirited pursuits, the lure of such rewards, especially as they are reasonably attainable for people of such high abilities, became much harder to resist.

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Ray Comfort is a Half-Wit and a Libelous Scalawag [The Primate Diaries]

Eric Michael Johnson none@example.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0800

Now that his plan has backfired drastically (his own website has removed the link to his "Introduction" of Darwin's book) and more people were offended by his distortions than anything else, let me briefly point out some useful information. Comfort makes the following assertions in his introduction:

Adolf Hitler took Darwin's evolutionary philosophy to its logical conclusions [and] the legacy of Darwin's theory can be seen in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion.

As the National Center for Science Education has pointed out:

This is simply hyperbole on Comfort's part. This laundry-list of unrelated controversial issues is meant to inflame passions rather than inform.

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Leafcutter ants rely on bacteria to fertilise their fungus gardens [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

Ed Yong none@example.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:30:40 -0500

Hardly a natural history documentary goes by without some mention of leafcutter ants. So overexposed are these critters that I strongly suspect they're holding David Attenborough's relatives to ransom somewhere. But there is good reason for their fame - these charismatic insects are incredibly successful because of their skill as gardeners.

As their name suggests, the 41 species of leafcutter ants slice up leaves and carry them back to their nests in long columns of red and green. They don't eat the leaves - they use them to grow a fungus, and it's this crop that they feed on. It's an old, successful alliance and the largest leafcutter colonies redefine the concept of a "super-organism". They include over 8 million individuals, span more than 20 cubic metres and harvest more than 240 kg of leaves every year. They're technically plant-eaters, with the fungus acting as the super-organism's external gut.

But the partnership between ant and fungus depends on other collaborators - bacteria. Some of these microbes help the ants to fertilise their gardens with valuable nitrogen, by capturing it from the atmosphere (a process known as "fixing"). Adrian Pinto-Tomas from the University of Wisconsin-Madison managed to isolate strains of these "nitrogen-fixing bacteria" from the gardens of 80 leafcutter colonies, throughout South and Central America.

Nitrogen is a scarce commodity for leafcutters, and the leaves they cut have too little of this vital element. And yet, they clearly get it from somewhere. The exhausted leaves they chuck into their refuse piles have higher proportions of nitrogen than those in the gardens, which have higher proportions than those that are freshly harvested or in the local leaf litter. Somewhere along the way, the cut leaves become enriched with nitrogen.

To find out how, Pinto-Tomas searched captive colonies of leafcutters for telltale signs of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. These microbes extract nitrogen from the air using an enzyme called, appropriately enough, nitrogenase. The enzyme also speeds up other chemical reactions, including converting acetylene into methane. So the fate of acetylene reveals the presence of nitrogenase, which in turn reveals the presence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

And that's exactly what happened - the test showed that nitrogenase was present and active in the gardens of all the 8 leafcutter species that Pinto-Tomas analysed. The enzyme and the bacteria that wield it are particularly active in the centre of the fungus gardens and not at all on the ants themselves, or the leaves they cut. Around half of the garden's supply of nitrogen comes from these bacteria.

But finding the bacteria wasn't enough; Pinto-Tomas had to show that these microbes were actually beneficial partners rather than casual stowaways. He did that by sealing the colonies in airtight chambers and pumped in air containing a relatively rare form of nitrogen called nitrogen-15. He found that after a week, levels of this isotope had increased not just in the fungus, but the worker ants and their larvae too.

The ants were clearly reaping substantial rewards from their bacterial tenants. And by denying the ants access to soil or other food sources, Pinto-Tomas showed that they were indeed getting their nitrogen from these bacteria, and not from other sources.

This joint venture with fungi and bacteria must be a key part to the leafcutters' undeniable success. It makes them a super-herbivore. The ants don't fall prey to insecticides produced by plants because the fungus deals with those, and the fungus doesn't have to cope with anti-fungal countermeasures because the ants break those down before plying it with leaves. As a result, both partners can exploit a massive variety of different plants, rather than specialising one any one type. A lack of nitrogen is the big limiting factor, but the ants can clearly overcome that too, with some bacterial assistance.

The partnership is probably a boon to other plants too. The leaves that the ants discard have 26 times more nitrogen than the surrounding leaf litter and they fertilise the surrounding soil. It's no coincidence that the diversity of plants tends to skyrocket near a leafcutter garbage dump.

The nitrogen-fixers aren't the only bacteria that cement the alliance between ant and fungus. A decade ago, Cameron Currie, who was also involved in this study, showed that leafcutters use another type of fungus as a pesticide. Their gardens are plagued by a different species of virulent, parasitic fungus and to protect their monocultures from these weeds, the ants use a type of Streptomyces bacteria. It hitches a lift on the ants' shell and it secretes antibiotics that halt the growth of the parasite.

These insects really are gardeners par excellence, not only successfully growing a monoculture crop, they also use pesticides and fertilisers. Now if they'd only return David Attenborough's family...

Reference: Science 10.1126/science.1173036

More on ants:

Images by Jarrod Scott, Cameron Currie and Bandwagonman

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Here we go again. Ecstasy, death...unsubstantiated claims. [DrugMonkey]

DrugMonkey none@example.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:07:07 -0500

Canada. Again. This time in Whistler:

A 20-year-old male had been found unconscious by friends. When police arrived, Whistler Fire Rescue Service and Emergency Health Services personnel were performing CPR, but failed to revive the victim, who was pronounced dead a short time later at the Whistler Health Care Centre, Wright said.
A second male who was at the same home was hospitalized after he, too, suffered an apparent overdose of MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine). He is expected to make a full recovery, Wright said.

Both men had ingested the drug in powdered form.

aaaand...

Earlier last week, a 17-year-old Fernie male who had also ingested MDMA in powered form almost died, Wright said, emphasizing that there was no connection between the two incidents.

Three overdoses requiring medical intervention, one death.

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Global Warming Alarmist Conspiracy Emails Hacked!!!11!! [Greg Laden's Blog]

Greg Laden none@example.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:23:33 -0500

The Anthropocentric Global Warming Denialist Community is collectively creaming in its collective jeans over the release of zillions of emails that definitively prove that the whole global warming conspiracy thing was made up. Real Climate has the story:

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Trying to understand the Norwegian swine flu mutations [Effect Measure]

revere none@example.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 06:03:38 -0500

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health is reporting sporadic occurrences of a mutation in a portion of the flu virus that is involved with the process by which it attaches to cells. I use the word "sporadic" because at this point there is no evidence that the cases where the genetic change has been found are epidemiologically linked. Therefore we don't see it spreading from person to person but rather arising in people after they have been infected. At least that's how it appears from reports, but we have only preliminary information at this point. According to WHO, the mutation has been seen before, again sporadically and as early as April, in Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, Ukraine, and the US. Should we be worried about it?

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Casual Fridays: What makes a good writer, and what motivates them? [Cognitive Daily]

Dave Munger none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:38:14 -0500

We received an astonishing number of responses to last week's Casual Fridays study, which claimed to be able to identify what makes a good writer in just a few minutes.

Of course, I wasn't actually very confident that a brief survey could actually identify the factors that make a good writer. But I did have a hunch that there were certain traits that were more likely to be associated with good writing.

Was there a trick to the study?
Some respondents had a hunch that writing wasn't the only thing we were interested in. You were right -- we were also studying a completely unrelated phenomenon -- more on that later.

But we did want to know about your writing as well, so let's start with that. The study asked a few questions about writing ability: how much writing you do for work/study, how easy writing comes to you, whether you've been published, and so on. Then there was a surprise writing test: 3 minutes to write as much as you can on any topic, to be judged for coherence but not content. Finally, a few more questions.

This week's study asked more of our readers than we usually do, so we expected that we wouldn't get as many responses as usual. We were wrong about that: over 1,400 responded to the survey, and over 800 wrote an essay response. The average response length was 133 words -- quite impressive for a three-minute time limit!

Many of the essays were skeptical that any human would actually read them, but I read every single one. I wanted to get a rough sense of the quality of the essays, so I assigned each a "grade." To get an A, you had to be coherent for the entire essay, and not switch topics. Just writing complete sentences and only switching topics once or twice earned a B. A semi-random string of sentences earned a C. Incoherent drivel got a D, or in rare cases, an F. These were converted to a 4-point grade scale (where A=4 and F=0). This graph shows the distribution of grades:

As you can see, B was by far the most common grade, with very few Ds and Fs. There were some great little stories, including several I wish the writers had had time to finish. Lots about babies and cats. But did the questions we asked shed any light on what makes a good writer?

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Falling into a Black Hole sucks! [Starts With A Bang]

Ethan Siegel none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:15:01 -0500

Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos -- novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes -- you are beyond doubt the strangest? -Walker Percy

When you watch someone fall into a black hole, what you actually see is pretty surprising. You see, a black hole's gravity distorts the space around it, and it does so without providing any light of its own, giving you a unique perspective on the Universe.

Well, if you watch someone else fall in, you'd see them approach the black hole normally, and then the bizarreness starts. As they go deeper and deeper into the gravitational field of the black hole, a few super bizarre things all start to happen simultaneously.

The light coming from the person gets redshifted; they'll start to take on a redder hue and then, eventually, will require infrared, microwave, and then radio "vision" to see.
The speed at which they appear to fall in will get asymptotically slow; they will appear to fall in towards the event horizon at a slower and slower speed, never quite reaching it.
The amount of light coming from them gets less and less. In addition to getting redder, they also will appear dimmer, even if they emit their own source of light!

But if you think that's bizarre, here's where it gets really weird: the person falling in notices no difference in how time passes or how light appears to them. They would continue to fall in to the black hole and cross the event horizon as though nothing happened.

What would you see if you fell into this black hole? Luckily, Andrew Hamilton and his group at Colorado have created a video (and an accurate video at that) to illustrate this:

And that's not even counting what the tidal forces would do to you as you fell in, which includes (in chronological order):

Tearing your extremities (head, arms, legs) from your torso,
tearing the individual muscles, tendons, ligaments, etc., apart from your body,
tearing individual cells apart from one another,
tearing the organelles inside each cell apart, destroying cells themselves,
tearing the individual molecules apart into atoms,
tearing your atoms apart into nuclei and electrons, and finally
tearing the individual nuclei apart into, eventually, quarks and gluons.

Fun stuff, yes? Perhaps someday, "death by black hole" will be commonplace, although it will take an infinite amount of time for you to see someone else experience it!

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The hacked climate science email scandal that wasn't [The Island of Doubt]

James Hrynyshyn none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:51:16 -0500

Much is being made by those who really, really believe that there's a global conspiracy among climatologists of the emails and other documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. According to such bloggers, thousands of "embarrassing" pieces of correspondence between some of the leading climate researchers in the world now lay bare the scheme to mislead humanity about the nature of climate change.

I downloaded the 62 MB file and took a quick look at a random selection of what are mostly dull little missives bereft of the context required to understand them in any meaningful way. Just as you'd expect from bits and piece of correspondence never intended for public consumption. Next.

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Friday Sprog Blogging: photosynthesis. [Adventures in Ethics and Science]

Janet D. Stemwedel none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:27:21 -0500

Dr. Free-Ride: Any ideas for tomorrow's sprog blog?

Younger offspring: I wanted to do how photosynthesis works.

Dr. Free-Ride: Did you do any research on that since last week?

Younger offspring: I don't do research.

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And now we turn to the topic of Artificial Intelligence ... [Collective Imagination]

Greg Laden none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:26:12 -0500

Artificial Intelligence as a term implies that there is a "natural" intelligence we wish to replicate in the lab and then engineer in any one of several practical contexts. There is nothing in the term that implies that "intelligence" be human, but the implication is clear that such a thing as "intelligence" exists and that we have some clue as to what it is.

But it might not, and we don't.

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The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center takes legal action against Evolv water [Terra Sigillata]

Abel Pharmboy none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:02:15 -0500

In September we posted "M.D. Anderson name misused in Evolv nutraceutical water advertising," detailing the not-exactly-truthful claim by a multilevel marketing company that their bottled water product was "tested" by one of North America's premier teaching and research hospitals.

A flurry of search engine hits to this post raised my attention to the fact that the The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has now initiated legal action against the makers of Evolv. Cameron Langford at Courthouse News Service reports:

Two companies are pushing bottled tap water with false claims that it's endorsed by the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the University of Texas says in Federal Court. The UT says HealtH20 Products and Evolvehealth sell the bogus water it as "Evolv," claiming it is infused with an "Archaea Active formula." [. . .]

[. . .] "Specifically, defendants are misleading consumers and cancer patients into believing that UT's MD Anderson conducted extensive testing of the main formula in the Evolv product, known as 'Archaea Active," the UT says.

"Defendants' misuse of the MD Anderson marks creates, at a minimum, a likelihood that cancer patients and consumers will falsely believe that defendants' products is sponsored or endorsed by UT's MD Anderson, when in fact, MD Anderson does not endorse or recommend the use of the defendants' product."

Natural products researchers, including yours truly, are used to supplement companies misrepresenting our published papers in their advertising literature. There's not much we can do as individuals when our work is cited on a webpage.

However, there's a much more serious issue going on in this case: according to the official complaint filed against the companies by the Board of Regents of The University of Texas System (PDF here from Courthouse News) M.D. Anderson and The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are registered US trademarks.

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Friday Rant: Atheists Need To Be Brighter [The Primate Diaries]

Eric Michael Johnson none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:07:36 -0800

Now that the Darwin Reclamation Project collage has been posted, I can confess that I have a few problems with the recent atheist action that sought to counter the dunderhead Ray Comfort and his Creationist propaganda ministry. I'm not sure who originally suggested this action, but I don't think it was well thought out. Having athiests systematically round up as many copies as they can of a work they disagree with (however ridiculous such a work may be) stinks of censorship and creates an impression in the broader public that Comfort's arguments are somehow threatening to evolutionary biologists. Obviously neither is the case. But a successful campaign is one that changes the debate and/or uses the powerful group's strategy against them.

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"Obama's fixin' death panels for your mama": The USPSTF recommendations for mammography used as a political weapon [Respectful Insolence]

Orac none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:00:00 -0500

As I discussed in detail when I analyzed them, the new USPSTF recommendations for screening mammography for breast cancer have sparked a debate that has degenerated from a scientific and public policy debate into pure emotional rhetoric. When last I visited this topic, yesterday, I had intended it to be my last post for a while, perhaps ever. However, the amount of idiocy that I was dealing with became so overwhelming and the post grew to even huger than Orac-ian proportions. So I decided to split the post into two parts, because the particular argument I'm about to discuss deserves its very own takedown. It also cleverly allowed me to post a big "TO BE CONTINUED..." and thereby nefariously manipulate my audience to be curious over whom the target of today's Insolence would be and thus more likely to pay me a return visit. Or not. Who knows? Either way, it let me make two long posts out of one gargantuan post. How cool is that?

For those just joining the debate, I concluded yesterday's post by describing the claim that the USPSTF's recommendations were the equivalent of "death panels" and an example of the horrors that will come if the health insurance plan being debated in the Senate right now were to become law as the undead beast continuing to lumber on, using one of my favorite analogies, the brain-eating zombie, to describe how the whole "death panels" thing destroys any intelligent argument and renders its adherents stupid and/or ignorant, much the way certain varieties of brain-eating zombies do when they feast upon grey matter. In fact, as I said yesterday, the brain-eating death panel zombie even shows up in places where you wouldn't necessarily expect it. In this case, it appears to have eaten can eat the brains of bloggers that I used to consider fairly reasonable, creating new zombies. However, unlike the drooling "Hot Air"-type death panel zombie, though, the new "death panel" zombies are more like the speedy, running zombies in 28 Days Later, not the shambling, dripping, drooling zombies of Night of the Living Dead. They're the new, improved, cleverer zombie, like the ones in The Return of the Living Dead who, after feasting on the brains of paramedics, picked up the radio from their ambulance and asked the dispatcher to send more paramedics. But at the heart, the zombie lie continues on, eating brains and reducing the level of debate from the merits of the recommendations as a matter of science and public to raw emotions manipulated by fear of government.

Most disturbing to me all was that a blogger who really should know better than to use such brain-chomped terms to describe a complex issue, Dr. Rich, has fallen victim to the zombie, likening the USPSTF's recommendations to "soft death panels":

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The ultimate anti-tar sands message [The Island of Doubt]

James Hrynyshyn none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:58:09 -0500

I promise to get back to substantive blogging shortly, but in the meantime, if you've got three minutes to tear yourself away from coverage of Sarah Palin's book:

Scientifically sound? Not the words I would use, but not too far off the mark, either. Hyperbolic? Yes. Offensive? To some. Provocative? Absolutely. Greenpeace and the Agit-Pop gang know how to grab your attention. If, that is, you already care about preserving what's left of the planet's ability to host civilization as we know it.

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Sivatherium: A giraffe with a trunk? [Laelaps]

Brian Switek none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:50:23 -0500

A giraffe, photographed at the Bronx zoo.

For me, no visit to the zoo is complete without stopping by to see the giraffes. They are among the most common of zoo animals, certainly, but I still find them fascinating. If giraffes did not actually exist and someone drew an illustration of one as a speculative zoology project the picture would likely be written off as absurd, yet the living animal is more charming than preposterous.

As with many extant large mammals, though, the giraffe is only a vestige of a once more diverse group. Its closest living relative is the okapi, a short-necked and forest-dwelling giraffe of the Congo, but many other types of giraffe lived in the not-too-distant past. Perhaps the most famous of these extinct forms is Sivatherium, a giraffe that might have survived until about 8,000 years ago and was once believed to have possessed a trunk.

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Sir John Crofton, TB combination therapy pioneer - a long and admirable life [Terra Sigillata]

Abel Pharmboy none@example.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:40:46 -0500

Denise Gellene in the New York Times is reporting this morning that Scottish physician, Sir John Crofton, passed away on 3 November at age 97.

Crofton is best known for implementing a combination drug regimen to treat tuberculosis, the insidious lung infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis which decimated the US early last century and still kills 2 million a year worldwide. The concept of using drug combinations to increase individual drug potency and slow the emergence of resistance is now a mainstay of therapeutic approaches for cancer, HIV, and other infectious diseases.

Gellene reports that Crofton first investigated streptomycin for TB shortly after the drug's discovery and isolation at Rutgers by Selman Waksman and his then-graduate student, Albert Schatz. Waksman was sole winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with the oversight of Schatz ranked by Scientific American among the top 10 Nobel snubs.

Crofton's original 1950 letter to the British Medical Journal on use of intermittent doses of streptomycin can be seen in this PDF.

Incidentally, the revered German physician, Robert Koch, was awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of M. tuberculosis. His medical microbiology criteria, known as Koch's Postulates, became the rubric for establishing causation of an infectious agent.

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